As a project manager, I often need a clean, professional way of showing a client what a project looks like via a Gantt chart or timeline, usually in a PowerPoint presentation. Often times, the information needs to be high level, too – so there’s nothing wrong with having a separate tool just for presenting this information. Sometimes you just want to impress your clients with more than technical knowledge, right? I believe presentations should be useful and shiny.

SharePoint permission configuration is one of the hardest things for end-users to understand. Sometimes it is easier to explain a specific scenario instead of how the entire permissions concept works.

This article will explain the following scenario:

The DW&C team has a new team site

Visitors should have read access to the site

People in the DW&C should have contribute permissions

There should be a group of site admins for taking care of the site

There needs to be a separate document library that only the management team has access to

This scenario would work in exactly the same way if this was a project site.

To start off, we’ll assume that the DW&C department has already created a standard team site.

Standard team site permissions

Our scenario team site has now been updated to have an extra Management Documents library and a calendar.

When creating this site, we created new permissions, which means that SharePoint automatically created the following groups with the following permissions:

Group

Permission level

Users

Explanation

DW&C Site Visitors

Read

All users

On an intranet, it’s best to give as much read access as possible to ensure transparency and findability.

DW&C Site Members

Contribute

All DW&C users

All users in the department should have the ability to influence the information on their department site.

DW&C Site Owners

Full control

Owners/admins

Choose a few users to manage the site, i.e. super users.

Note: some people suggest adding the department’s manager to the Owners group – after all, they are responsible for the department. However, managers should generally be added to the Members group. Specific users should be chosen to manage the site and be added to the Owners group. The managers will get extra access to their specific documents later in this scenario.

In the starting scenario, the users in these groups have access to all of the content on this team site as nothing specific has been configured.

This means that all users also have access to that Management Documents library, which should be kept separate just for DW&C’s management team. To configure that, we will need to set up a new user group.

Creating a new user group and filling it

In SharePoint, it is possible to assign permissions in three ways:

To a SharePoint group (add Active Directory users, groups or SharePoint groups)

Directly to an Active Directory group

To an Active Directory user

The first two options are fine, in most cases. However, option #3 should generally be avoided. It is much better to create a group and assign permissions to the group rather than assign permissions directly to a user. The contents of the group is far easier to maintain rather than going through and changing a specific user’s permissions.

It is possible to directly assign permissions to AD groups, which does have advantages in some environments. However, when working with an intranet team or project site, SharePoint groups are usually the easiest to work with.

To create a new group for a site, do the following:

Go to the site you wish to add the group to

Click the cog wheel and go to “Site Actions”

Choose “Site permissions”

Choose “Create group” from the ribbon

Note: the new user group will be available for the entire site collection, not just this one site. You should name it accordingly – in this scenario, I will name it “DW&C Site Management” to keep with the current naming convention.

When creating the group, the current user is set as owner. In most cases, this should be set to the site owners group, so that they can maintain the membership of this group.

I suggest giving this group “contribute” permissions.

Once the group has been created, you can add users to the group by clicking “New” and “Add users”. You should be able to select the applicable management users from the Active Directory by typing in their names, emails or user IDs.

Changing the permissions for the Management group

Now we have the DW&C Site Management user group, but we need to change the permissions on the Management Documents library so that only the Management user group has access to it. To do that, we will need to break the permission inheritance on the Management Documents library.

To change the permissions on the Management Documents library, please do the following:

Go to the library

Go to the “Library” tab and choose “Library settings”

Choose “Permissions for this document library”

Observe that the library currently inherits permissions from its parent, the DW&C Site. Click “Stop inheriting permissions” to break the inheritance.

Now the library has unique permissions; the options in the ribbon have changed. If you want to revert back to inheriting permissions, you could click “Delete unique permissions”.

Remove the visitor and member permissions by selecting the groups and choosing “Remove user permissions” in the menu. As of now, the users in these groups will not have any access to the Management Documents library.

As a final step, you should determine if the DW&C Site Owners group should retain their permissions. Note that one group will need to have “full control”, so either the Owners group will need to stay or the Management group will need to have their permissions upgraded.

I decided to organise a small project by using a SharePoint task list on a Office 365 project site. I figure that if it gets too complicated, I can always just open the entire thing in Microsoft Project.

I realized fairly quickly that seeing week numbers in the list was a valuable thing:

Group the tasks by week

See the total number of estimated hours per week

I created a calculated column and used the comments on this page, Group A List by Week Number. I ended up changing the formula a little bit – there are some activities in December and some in January, so I wanted to see the year, as well as the week number for sorting purposes.

You can see an error on the third line: that’s because [Start Date] is empty on that line, so the week number could not be correctly calculated. I just wanted to get on with the project planning and not spend more time on the formula.

Once you have the week number in place, you can easily make views like this one, where I grouped by Week and then summed up the total hour estimate:

The formula has the following considerations:

Weeks begin on Monday

Working with Swedish regional settings – you may need to change around a few periods, semi-c0lons, etc.

Option 1: Paste the code directly into the page content

However, once you save the page and view it, you will see that SharePoint does not realize that it is code it needs to render in some way.

Conclusion: do not place code directly in the page content as it does not work.

Option 2: Edit source in rich text area / CEWP

In most content editor webparts and all rich text areas, there is a button in the ribbon called “Edit source”. This is great for quick fixes when content has gotten out of hand. In older versions of SharePoint, you could also use it to embed extra code.

You can easily paste your code straight into the Edit HTML window.

However, once you save, SharePoint lets you know that the code that it does not approve of has been stripped.

In this case, some of the embedded code has been stripped out.

Sometimes SharePoint will strip out all of it and sometimes it will only strip out parts which can cause an odd result. When it doubt, check back into the HTML source to see what has happened with your code and if it is still 100% intact.

Conclusion: while this used to work under some older SharePoint versions, it is generally not a reliable solution for SharePoint 2013.

Option #3: Using the Embed command

SharePoint 2013 includes an Embed command in the ribbon which can be great for adding code snippets to your page:

After clicking the command, you are prompted to insert your code and given a preview:

SharePoint creates a Script Editor webpart on the page for you. It even includes an “Edit Snippet” button, so you can go back and edit the code later.

The JavaScript is being displayed correctly in the webpart and also on publishing the page.

Conclusion: in my experience, this works but is dependent on the complexity of the code. Test well before using.

Option 4: save as a text file, call via CEWP

I have saved the JavaScript into a file called copyright.html. The file extension can help SharePoint determine how to parse the code when it is called, but you may need to experiment depending on your code – I have had good results from using txt, html and js extensions in the past.

Here is the file in Notepad++:

In this demo, I uploaded the HTML file to the document library on the same site as the page we are working with.

Tip: I tend to use the following rules of thumb as to where to upload these kinds of files:

Think about if you want to save it in the standard Document library, or if you want to create a dedicated document library called “Scripts” or similar

If the file will be called from just one single site, save it on the site

if the file will be used across just one site collection, consider saving it at the root of the site collection or in the Style Library of that site collection (i.e. Styles/Scripts)

If using across multiple site collections, choose the most logical place for it, i.e. on a root site collection

Next, place a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) on the page and edit the webpart settings. At the top, add the link to the file and click “Apply” to save the changes.

The content should immediately display in the CEWP on the page.

Tip: if you wish to use the same webpart in many places, you could export the configured CEWP and import it as a custom webpart. You can then place it on a page and it will already be configured for you.

Conclusion: this is my favorite method due to the central storage of the files, ease of editing the files and reusability.

One of my current clients works with the Harmon.ie Outlook addon for copying emails and documents to SharePoint. I believe it is a neat and useful tool which can complement OneDrive for Business.

I recently got a request to allow users to create favorite libraries/sites on SharePoint and have this list be synced with Harmon.ie.

Summary

Harmon.ie does not seem to have a way access SharePoint 2013’s “follow” functionality. This may be possible with registry edits or custom code, but I have not found the solution yet.

However, Harmon.ie can sync with the My Links list, which is part of the User Profile Service from SharePoint 2010 and onwards. Libraries can be added to this via the “Connect to Office” button. It is also possible in MOSS 2007.

SharePoint 2013 “follow”

In SharePoint 2013, new “follow” functionality has been added, allowing users to follow People, Documents, Sites, and #Tags. It is then possible to see updates via the newsfeed on your My Site.

The idea was to allow the client to select which sites they would like to follow, then use that information for two purposes:

Display a list of favorite sites on the landing page

Input for the “favorites” in the Harmon.ie Outlook client

The first goal turned out to be fairly easy – once I found out that the “Site” content type on the My Site is not actually searchable. There is a premade REST/jQuery soution available via I Am Following which worked beautifully. The page includes a link to the code download on Codeplex.

The second turned out to be quite a bit harder. I spent a lot of time investigating the Harmonie documentation and tried everything I could find, including using registry edits for site propogation in the Harmon.ie favorites. That site propagation turned out to only work for the enterprise client, not the free client and was really more for prepolating the client with specific sites. I was not able to get the registry edit “SyncFavoritesWithMyLinks” working, as described on Add My Links to the sites and favorites lists.

Conclusion: there is currently no good way to sync the followed content on SharePoint 2013 with Harmonie.

However….

My Links

After lots of frustrating, I was rereading the documentation on the Harmonie site and came across the following:

My Links is the old bookmarking functionality in SharePoint, used in SharePoint 2007 and 2010. It was replaced by the follow functionality in SharePoint 2013. It requires the User Profile service to be enabled, as it is a per-user list. Clicking the button adds the current library to My Links.

You can access this, exactly as the documentation states, via the Library tab of document libraries:

This same functionality is used to create shortcuts in Microsoft Office applications for opening and saving documents.

To make this document library be added to the favorites in your Harmon.ie client, follow these steps:

Click the “Connect to Office” button in the applicable library

Restart Outlook (the list is checked on application startup)

Find the new list in your favorites in Harmon.ie

You can maintain the My Links list by clicking on the dropdown on the Connect to Office button. You’ll see that the list looks pretty much as it did in SharePoint 2007.

I have rarely seen clients use the Reusable Content option. Occasionally it will be used to add a disclaimer to a page – but often that’s best placed in a page layout for a specific page type anyway. There just doesn’t seem to be much of a use for it, though I’ve always wondered if there could be a really useful application.

In a recent project, Daniel Gustafsson found two really cool uses for it: adding a floating image to page content and adding numbered bullet points which are highly styled. These are by far the most interesting uses I have ever seen for the Reusable Content, which is why I asked Daniel if I could share them with you here.

I have rarely seen clients use the Reusable Content option. Occasionally it will be used to add a disclaimer to a page – but often that’s best placed in a page layout for a specific page type anyway. There just doesn’t seem to be much of a use for it, though I’ve always wondered if there could be a really useful application.

In a recent project, Daniel Gustafsson found two really cool uses for it: adding a floating image to page content and adding numbered bullet points which are highly styled. These are by far the most interesting uses I have ever seen for the Reusable Content, which is why I asked Daniel if I could share them with you here.

This example is done using SharePoint 2013, but should work for all versions. Be careful with the HTML5 on older versions of SharePoint, though. You will need to add your own CSS.

This article will discuss how to handle an image with float left:

And it will also handle numbered bullet items:

What is Reusable Content?

Reusable Content allows end users to save snippets of commonly used text or HTML which can then easily be put onto a page.

All Reusable Content is saved into one list per site collection, always saved at the root in the list Reusable Content.

Reusable content can be anything you might need to reuse:

Byline

Disclaimer text

Standard piece of HTML

“About me” text

Once a piece of content has been added to the Reusable Content list, it can be added to a page by clicking the Reusable Content button in the ribbon and then choosing the item from the list.

Reusable Content items come with an interesting feature called “Automatic Update”. If you turn this on for an item and update the content, it will update everywhere the Reusable Content has been placed. this can be extremely useful in many places. In the following two examples, it must be turned OFF for the functionality to work correctly.

Image float left

Image float left inserts an image with text possibilities into the page, floated left:

The default image is configured as a basic placeholder, giving the user something to click. Once the image is selected, you can choose a new image via the Replace Image option in the ribbon.

The texts can be replaced just by clicking on them and changing them to whatever the user needs. The texts also keep their formatting, as long as the user doesn’t delete too much of the reusable content item.

Bullet points with header

Sometimes the default unordered list in SharePoint is overly boring, even after styling it. The developers in this project came up with a much cooler way to display the content:

It’s a little fiddly in the implementation and later changes – adding something in between the current header 2 and header 3 is difficult, for example. However, when you are looking for a very stylized front-end website, it may very well be worth it.

This content actually consists of two pieces of Reusable Content: first, the Numbered List Item Wrapper is placed. Afterwards, the Numbered List Items can be placed into that wrapper.

Add this Reusable Content item to the wrapper as described below, simply adding more bullets until there are as many as you would like that. Afterwards, edit the headers and texts to match what is required.

@hannahrswain on Twitter

About me

Hannah's SharePoint is a personal blog run by Hannah Swain. It covers Microsoft SharePoint as well as other Microsoft products and is oriented at business and end users.
For more information, please see the About me page.